Editor’s Note: This story was produced by Agência Pública (Brazil). You can read the original version here.
It was late afternoon on June 17 in Newport, Vermont, when six Brazilian carpenters left the house where they were working on a renovation. On the horizon, eight patrol cars appeared at high speed and suddenly stopped near the workers. Dozens of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents got out and ordered the group to lie on the ground. “They stepped on our heads, handcuffed us, and took us to the station. And we didn’t know why we were being arrested,” said Salomão Castelo Branco Borges, 21, one of those detained.
With his head against the floor, Borges asked why he was being arrested, but he received no response. The young Brazilian feared making any movement that could cause further aggression. “We were scared, because they could shoot us or use a Taser. That’s how it works there: If you make any sudden move, they can shoot,” he told Agência Pública.
“On the first day, I thought they had picked me up by mistake. … I didn’t know what kind of situation I was getting into,” he said. Borges only learned 24 hours later, at the Newport police station, that the reason for his arrest was having an expired visa. He’d had a student visa and was applying for a green card.
In the 24 hours at the station, he and his co-workers were crammed into a cell, exhausted from lying on the cold floor, without food, water, showers, or even a toilet, and allowed only a single two-minute phone call. “Mom, I was arrested, but I should be out tomorrow,” was all Salomão Borges could share. At that point, he didn’t have enough information to say more.
From then on, the young Brazilian went through a 51-day ordeal under custody, passing through minimum to maximum-security prisons and an immigrant detention center in Port Isabel where, according to him, food and water were rationed and there was never a word on when he might be reunited with his family.
By early June, more than 200,000 people had been deported from the United States since President Donald Trump took office and another 60,000 were in immigrant detention. At least 1,800 Brazilians were arrested by ICE in that time, according to a Pública analysis on ICE data as of July 31. In Texas, ICE detained 32. Massachusetts is the state with the highest number of detentions in the period at 864.
The day after the arrest, Borges and five other Brazilians were shackled at the wrists, ankles, and waist by ICE agents and then transferred to a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in Vermont, where they spent 14 days. This was just one of the nine detention centers the young man would pass through over the course of 51 days.
Borges described the CBP facility as “calm,” since the space was shared with 50 people who had committed minor offenses. Later, ICE transferred the group of carpenters to a maximum-security prison in Berlin, New Hampshire, where there were more than 300 inmates serving sentences for various crimes such as robbery, rape, and homicide.
“That’s where the terror happened. I saw a lot of fights—including one guy just a few feet away from me, slashing another man’s face with a razor blade,” he recalled. “We couldn’t sleep out of fear.”
The cell was small and rectangular, with two beds and a tiny window letting in some light. Borges and another Brazilian man spent an average of 16 hours confined in that space. According to Borges, meals were served at 5 a.m., 11 a.m., and 4 p.m., but they didn’t always include protein. “In the morning, it was always oatmeal. For lunch and dinner, we had vegetables and soup. Every now and then, they would send a piece of chicken,” he said.
To try to provide Borges with more decent food, his family sent money to the places where he was held, hoping that the staff would use it to buy food. However, due to the constant transfers he was subjected to, the food never reached him. Beyond food, even the little contact he could have with his family came at a cost: $2 per call, $6 per video, and 25 cents per text message.
“Being conservative, we spent about $10,000. The lawyer alone cost $4,000. [Also] we needed to pay to talk to my son, and many times we had to send money so he could try to eat somehow, because the prison food was scarce, of terrible quality, and insufficient,” said Edlaine Távora, Borges’s mother.
Larissa Salvador, a Brazilian lawyer and immigration specialist in the United States, explained that ICE has been placing immigrants in maximum-security prisons due to the high number of arrests. “They can’t keep up. They can’t deport people fast enough, nor get them in front of a judge quickly enough for the system to work,” she said.
The private prisons where the Brazilian was held have become an increasingly common facility in the States, since they are “a profitable business, being listed on the stock exchange,” said Alvaro Lima, founder of Boston-based Diáspora Brasil Institute, which studies the immigration of Brazilians. “There’s a business inside prison: The family sends money to buy more food, clothing, and water,” said Lima. “But if the family doesn’t have money, they [private prisons] came up with something ‘extraordinary:’ You can work for one dollar a day to get access to those things.”
While he was imprisoned in Berlin, Borges went through a hearing, and the judge said that if he bought his own plane ticket, he could leave prison and the country. Friends and family raised $800, which would be enough to cover a flight from Boston to Brazil.
“I bought my ticket, but they didn’t take me to the airport. They didn’t keep their word, because they said it was a ‘waste of time’ and that it was ‘out of their way,’” Borges said about the agents.
During this period, at a new hearing, he volunteered to leave the country rather than continue waiting for the outcome of his asylum request. According to his mother, Edlaine Távora, the hearing took place when Borges had completed a month in detention, and the federal prosecutor said that his case was an expedited removal. “The judge said: ‘Salomão, you have the right to appeal,’ to which he replied: ‘I don’t want to’. He requested voluntary departure,” his mother recounted.
After the hearing, the Brazilian man said he was moved through three different police stations in Massachusetts before being transferred to Texas, where he served the remainder of his detention.
According to Lima, the constant prison transfers happen in a “malicious” way to weaken immigrants’ ties, leaving them far from communities, lawyers, and even their own families. “[ICE] arrests you in Massachusetts, for example, where judges are more liberal, then they send you to Texas or to places where prisons are harsher, and judges think if someone should be deported, they deport them,” Lima explained.
Borges’ last prison transfer in the United States happened at the end of July, when the Brazilian was placed on a flight from Boston to Houston, where he would serve the final part of his detention before returning to Brazil.
Before being transferred to the immigrant detention center in Port Isabel, he passed through two more jails. “For ten days, I was only eating bread, bologna, and cheese. Morning, afternoon, and night. Nothing else,” Borges said.
The rationing extended even to water, as immigrants were only entitled to about 800 milliliters per day, he said, below the recommended 3.7 liters of fluid per day according to the U.S. Institute of Medicine. “You couldn’t brush your teeth or change clothes. You couldn’t do anything,” he recounted.
Rectangular, cold, and empty, the space was nicknamed “the fridge” by Borges and his colleagues. To shelter from the cold, immigrants were given thin thermal blankets, which were not enough to warm their bodies. “No bed, only a toilet, and no food,” Borges described.
By that stage of his detention, he was accompanied by only three of the other five Brazilians arrested with him in Newport. One managed to obtain asylum, he said, and another had been transferred early on. The rest boarded the same flight that brought Borges back to Brazil.
Borges, his parents, and his two younger brothers aimed to live the “American Dream,” but for the family, the experience turned into a nightmare, which he described as “humiliating” and “traumatic” in Trump’s America.
“When I close my eyes, I see the image of what I went through there: the jail and the darkness of the cells. Then I wake up scared, thinking I might have to go through all of that again,” the young man recounted.
Borges returned to Brazil on August 7, on a U.S. Air Force flight carrying deportees of various nationalities. The plane departed from Houston, made two other stops, and finally reached Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southwestern state of Minas Gerais, a 24-hour journey without food or water, he said.
Larissa Salvador explained that staying in the country with an expired visa or using a type of visa other than a residency visa to settle in the United States is not considered a criminal offense but is subject to penalties, and ICE agents are instructed to carry out detentions—but the way it has been happening is “questionable.
“The person just overstayed their visa. You don’t need to treat them as if they had killed your father, brother, uncle, and little puppies. Because many arrests have been carried out like that,” the lawyer said.
In an official statement, the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that “The Consulate General of Brazil in Boston provided consular assistance to the Brazilian national detained in Vermont and to his family,” referring to Borges’ case.
The statement also said that “The Brazilian government has made continuous efforts to ensure fair, dignified, and humane treatment for all Brazilians in custody in the United States. These efforts include guarantees of dignified treatment on U.S. soil, adequate conditions during repatriation flights—such as using shorter air routes, the presence of a Brazilian consular officer during boarding, and the non-use of handcuffs on Brazilian territory, among other measures.”
ICE did not respond to an Agência Pública request for comment for this story.
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